Christmas, Nature, and the “Art of Slaughter”
“The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered.
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” Genesis 9:2-3
.
“Carnism denies there is a problem with eating animals; second, it justifies eating meat as normal, natural, and necessary; third, to prevent cognitive dissonance, carnism alters the perception of the animals as living individuals into food objects, abstractions, and categories. Joy argues there is a neurological basis for empathy; most people care about nonhuman animals and want to prevent their suffering. Further, humans value compassion, reciprocity, and justice. However, human behavior does not match these values. To continue to eat animals, Joy argues, people engage in psychic numbing, which alters the perception of our behavior towards animals and uses defense mechanisms to block empathy.”
.
The Butcher and his Servant (1568), drawn and engraved by Jost Amman
.
We withdraw because we know that dealing with one serious issue tends to open up many other interlinked issues, while, at the same time getting progressively bigger as well as stretching backwards and forwards in time. Claudia von Werlhof grasps these widening problems and deals with them head on. She believes that the essential problem is rooted in an ideology which has as its basis a hatred for life itself. She blames the centuries-old socio-political systems of patriarchy and capitalism that are “characterized by exploitation, extraction and appropriation.” She notes:
Man’s best friend, animals’ worst enemy
.
Over the centuries the system of killing has become more and more sophisticated. In art, depictions of hunting show changes from trapping to chasing with dogs to shooting with guns. In many paintings dogs are the ‘collaborationists’ who turn on their fellow animals for the benefit of their masters.
.
.
A 14th-century depiction of boar hunting with hounds from Tacuina sanitatis (XIV century)
.
.
Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Hunting At The Saint-jean Pond In The Forest Of Compiegne, Before 1734
.
In one extraordinary set of paintings by the artist Paulus Potter (1625–1654), Punishment of a Hunter, we see different forms of entrapment and killing depicted around two central paintings, one of which shows the hunter going on trial before a court of animals, while the other shows some animals dancing for joy as the ‘treacherous’ dogs are hung and the dead hunter is roasted in a roaring fire.
.
.
Punishment of a Hunter, painting with 14 frames by Paulus Potter, 1 of which is by Cornelis van Poelenburgh (ca.1650)
.
Hunting the seas
Negative attitudes towards hunting on land also extend to whale hunting and fishing as the seas are depleted of life and thus potentially creating a catastrophic collapse of the marine ecological cycle. Factory ships, fish farming and whaling have come in for much criticism, while quotas for certain species of fish have been imposed by governments due to overfishing. In the examples shown here we see whale hunting being depicted as heroic as the hunters deal with huge whales and fierce weather, then an ambivalent merchant, to a later painting of a cruel, knife-wielding monger.
.
.
Robert Walter Weir Jr, Taking a Whale / Shooting a Whale with a Shoulder Gun (ca. 1855-1866)
.
A 16th-century Flemish fishmonger painted by Joachim Beuckelaer.
.
Gyula Derkovits (1894-1934) – Fish seller (1930)
Slaughterhouse industry
The greatest criticism in recent decades has been reserved for the practices carried out in slaughterhouses using what were declared to be ‘humane’ ways of killing animals. Time and time again shocking, secretly filmed footage has emerged of extreme cruelty towards sentient beings uttering horrific shrieks as they are chased and battered to death. In recent depictions shown here artists use Expressionist techniques to try and depict the horror of the slaughterhouse bloodletting.
.
.
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), Im Schlachthaus (1893)
.
.
Nicolai Fechin (1881–1955) – The Slaughterhouse (1919)
.
Sue Coe (born 1951) is an English artist and illustrator who goes one step further by using her works to benefit animal rights organizations as well as illustrating books and essays to explore issues such as factory farming and meat packing.
.
.
Sue Coe – My mother and I watch a pig escape the slaughterhouse
The struggle against all these different old and modern practices of industrializing and converting our fellow beings into various types of products seems to be finally taking hold of the popular imagination. In a recent article in the UK Andrew Anthony wrote that:
.
“Meat consumption in this country has declined by 17% over the past decade. The Economist magazine named 2019 “The Year of the Vegan”. And last year the World Health Organization recommended a plant-based diet for a healthy life. That endorsement, along with growing concerns about the impact of dairy farming on the environment, combined with the lifestyle rethink enabled by the lockdown, has significantly increased the number of people turning their backs on animal products in the UK.”
.
The Vegan Society commissioned research that found that: “At least 542,000 people in Britain are now following a vegan diet and never consume any animal products including meat, fish, milk, cheese, eggs and honey. This is a whopping increase since the last estimate of 150,000 ten years ago, making veganism one of Britain’s fastest growing lifestyle movements.” Furthermore, Jasmijn de Boo, CEO of The Vegan Society commented that “more people than ever before are acting upon the health and environmental benefits of veganism, and finding out what really goes on in the meat and dairy industries and deciding they do not want to contribute to the pain and suffering of animals.” Maybe we are seeing the seeds of a new enlightened attitude towards animals which will also be reflected in a more positive art in the future.
.
Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here.
.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)